A window

open on the world

t

i

TREASURES

OF

WORLD ART

(Q

Pakistan

Mother and child

from Mohenjodaro

Mohenjadaro, in the Indus

Valley, was a centre of one of

the world's great early

civilizations, which blossomed

between 2500 and 1500 BC.

Since then the water table in

this region has risen and

Mohenjodaro's ruins today rest

on a quagmire ; salts left behind

when the sun evaporates the

water are eating away like a

cancer at the ancient bricks.

Unesco is actively collaborating

in efforts to preserve

Mohenjodaro, whose artists and

craftsmen were past masters at

using clay, not only for building

but for fashioning household

objects and a host of curious

figurines. Shown here,

terracotta figure of a mother

bearing her child in the crook of

her arm. Throughout 1979

International Year of the Child,

the Unesco Courier will devote

its "Treasures of World Art"

feature to works of art depicting

children.

Photo © A. Martin, Paris

The Unesco COUIíerJANUARY 1979 32nd YEAR

PUBLISHED IN 20 LANGUAGES

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page

4 THE SILENCED MAJORITY

Two thousand million children

in search of their rights

by Elise Bou/ding

CRADLED IN HUNGER

Half the world's children under six

are victims of malnutrition

by Fernando Monckeberg Barros

13 THE STING IN THE FAIRY TALE

by Jorge Enrique Adoum

17 THE ROAD TO SELF-EXPRESSION

Awakening the latent language skills

of handicapped children

by Anne McKenna

18 DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD

23 MAKING TOYS IS CHILD'S PLAY

Photo story

27 WHAT'S IN A NAME?

by Hélène Gratiot Alphandéry

32 CHILDREN IN THE NEVER, NEVER LAND OF EXILE

2 TREASURES OF WORLD ART

PAKISTAN: Mother and child from Mohenjodaro

l-IV NEWS FROM UNESCO

Special supplement

Cover

To mark the opening of 1979, proclaimed

International Year of the Child by the United

Nations, this issue of the Unesco Courier

examines some of the problems which must

be tackled in order to promote the welfare of

disadvantaged children in many parts of the

world. In 1959 the United Nations adopted a

Magna Carta for children, the Declaration of

the Rights of the Child (for full text see pages

18-19), but today, 20 years later, these rights

are in many cases still In abeyance if not

blatantly violated. The Unesco Courier

intends to devote other issues and articles

later in the year to less sombre aspects of the

world of childhood.

Photo P. Frey © Sipa Presse, Paris

If all the children in the world

under the age of fourteen were to

stand one on another's shoulders

they would form a column

stretching about three and a half

times the mean distance from the

earth to the moon.

Drawing © Sophie and David Brabyn, aged 7

THE International Year of the Child is

not only an occasion to consider the

needs of children in a world all too

full of violence, hunger and social depriv¬

ation, it is also an occasion to note the

many things that children and young peo¬

ple contribute to the lives of adults their

imagination, their sensitivity, their capacity

for work and play and invention. It is time

to celebrate their presence on the great

wheel of life along which we all move, and

their partnership in creating the world we

live in.

In the eyes of the law, particularly in the

Western world, persons remain "children"

until they reach the legal age of majority.

Only then do they have full rights of con¬

tract and social choice. There is a great

contrast between what children really do in

the world, and what the law permits. Most

adults, even those that are parents, are

largely unaware of this contradiction. In

what follows the young are presented as

thinkers and doers, as shapers of society.

Ageism is a new word in the new human

rights vocabulary. Unesco documents

about youth sometimes use the term "anti-

youth racialism," to refer to the hostility

toward youth which is expressed both in

public policy and private utterance.

The silenced

Two thousand million children

in search of their rights

by Elise Boulding

elderly to do what they want them to do

without using force. The alternative rela¬

tionship of mutual respect and mutual sup¬

port for continued growth throughout life

is all too rarely seen.

Most Western adults would not dare to

talk to their peers the way they talk to chil¬

dren. Nor would they accept the ¡nterrup-

ELISE BOULDING, U.S. sociologist, is secretary of

the Programme Advisory Council of the United Nations

University's Human and Social Development Pro¬

gramme. She has carried out many transnational stu¬

dies on conflict and peace, development, family life and

women in society and is the author of The Underside of

History: A View of Women through Time, a study of

women's social, economic and political roles over four

millennia. Her study Children's Rights and the Wheel of

Life, written especially for the International Year of the

Child, will be published later this year by Transaction

Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, U.S.A.

tions, corrections, demands for attentive-

ness and instant displays of affection that

children accept as a matter of course.

The theme of all human rights cove¬

nants, and the motif of all liberation move¬

ments, is participation in the shaping of

one's own life and that of the society

around one, and reasonable access to the

resources that will make that participation

possible. In the case of children, either it is

true that they are ignorant and incapable of

significant social participation, and must be

segregated from the adult world until the

age of majority, or they are developing their

ability to participate from early childhood

and should be involved in decision-making

in the family and public spheres to an

extent determined by their interest and abi-

"Ageism" is a better term because it covers

both ends of the age spectrum. Hostility

toward the elderly receives more guarded

expression, but it too is present. Ageism is

the denial of certain rights and responsibili¬

ties to persons simply because of their age.

Emphasizing the "responsibility" compo¬

nent of the word rights helps us to see how

inappropriate it is to conceive of rights as

offering only protection. Even the most

democratic society has strong authoritarian

elements, particularly when it is wearing its

protective face. The individual to be pro¬

tected has no option but to receive that

protection when and how the protecting

institutions of a society decree. As the

Unesco 1972 Report on Rights and Res¬

ponsibilities of Youth says, "Seen in this

light, the responsibilities of young people,

instead of meaning an opportunity for the

young to take the initiative in actions which

concern them and which ultimately con¬

cern society as a whole, seem more like

duties imposed on them by adult

society the duty of submission to the

authority of the family, the community or

the State; the duty to receive education

devised in the main by adults or not

receive it if they belong to underprivileged

social groups; the duty to work, often at an

early age and under harsh conditions, or,

conversely, to be the first to be affected by

unemployment; the duty, lastly, to respect

a world order established independently of

them and which is becoming more and

more alien to them."

In striking at the roots of ageism we

strike at the drive to dominate, to mould

others. Authority, power, statuswords

we could not do without in describing

modern social organization turn sour

under examination when we consider

parent-child relations, or adult-elderly rela¬

tions. Authority is the power of people in

their middle years to get children and the

Photo © Ed van der Elsken, Edam, The Netherlands

Children make up over fifty per cent

of the population of the world, yet

they have little say even in the

ordering of their own lives. During

the International Year of the Child,

the attention of the world will be

focused on this "silenced majority" ir

an attempt to ensure worldwide

compliance with the articles of the

United Nations Declaration of the

Rights of the Child (see page 18).

lity. If the latter is true, some substantial

changes in the current United Nations

Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and

in associated concepts of the rights and

responsibilities of children in families and

communities will be required, both in cus¬

tom and in law.

More than that, some substantial

changes in our conception of society and

the civic order will also be required. Since

children represent well over fifty per cent of

the world's population at present, and are

completely excluded from the reporting,

evaluating and policy-making processes of

every society, an opening up of these pro¬

cesses to all young persons able to express

interest and concern, of whatever age,

would in the long run represent a revolu

tion of unimaginable proportions in every

country in the world, to say nothing of the

United Nations itself.

The Year of the Child can be the occa¬

sion for a basic rethinking of personhood

and human rights because it points to the

only minority human condition that is uni¬

versally experienced, childhood, and the

only human process that is universally

experienced, aging. Here is an opportunity

for every individual to link, in imagination,

his or her own personal life span with those

of the young and old among us today, to

re-experience and rethink the familiar old

dominance patterns, and see afresh what

they mean in terms of stunted physical,

social and spiritual growth for everyone.

The same exercises of power that limit

5

y personhood also support institutions and

processes of social and economic injustice.

Children, adults and elderly alike fall sick,

go hungry, die prematurely as a result of

war, disease and hunger, because

dominance/submission, centre/periphery,

haves/ have-nots struggles are played out

within and between nations as well as in

families and local communities. The young

and the old belong to the world's periphery

and they are always the first to go hungry,

especially if they are poor; and most of the

world's poor are either very young or very

old.

The arena of public policy is both the

first and the last place to look for signifi¬

cant social change toward a more just

social order. If "United Nations Years"

mean anything, they mean an opportunity

to re-examine ends and means with regard

to policy issues. The International Year of

the Child offers policy-makers a fresh place

to start with issues of human welfare: at

the point where child, adult and local com¬

munity relationships intersect. A change in

social attitudes toward children would

affect every nook and cranny of society,

and every person in it.

Adult-child relationships offer a critical

intervention point for breaking the vicious

circle of dominance behaviour that per¬

vades public and international life. These

patterns are laid down in the home every

day through the inappropriate exercise of

power, invisibly interwoven with the acts

of human caring that sustain the institution

of the family as a continuously viable set¬

ting for human growth. We may be unne¬

cessarily sabotaging our present and our

children's future by being blind to the

inconsistencies and irrationalities of the

relations between adults and children in

family and community in this century.

Mass media programmes about the right to

a happy and secure childhood, and to a

happy and secure retirement, are no substi¬

tute for the actual experience of frank and

honest confrontation between generations

when perceptions, needs and interests dif¬

fer, in a context of mutual acceptance of

responsibility for each other. Neither can

special feeding, health and education pro¬

grammes undertaken for children be a

substitute for joint community projects car¬

ried out by adults and children together, in

which the capacity of the young to contri¬

bute to the welfare of all receives full reco¬

gnition.

We pride ourselves in the West on

having applied the findings of a century of

child development research to the handling

of infants, children and youth. We have

structured their environments, designed

their toys and learning materials, analyzed

their readiness to receive teaching of

varying degrees of complexity. We are the

potters, they are the clay. The friends of

children in every age have always intuitively

known that there was more to it than that.

New findings are emerging from child

development laboratories that point to an

autonomous self-organized learning pro¬

cess that begins with birth and can be

easily interfered with by adults who treat

the newborn as a blind and cuddly bit of

protoplasm. Observant workers with pre¬

school children are noting the self-

organizing nature of their learning, the

complexity of judgements about body

movements in time and space that they can

develop when not over-organized in their

activity, the sensitive mutual aid that goes

on among them when they are left free to

solve their own problems. We are also

Article 9 of the Declaration of the

Rights of the Child declares: "...The

child shall not be admitted to

employment before an appropriate

minimum age; he shall in no case

be caused or permitted to engage

in any occupation or employment

which would prejudice his health or

education, or interfere with his

physical, mental or moral

development." Official figures for

children under fifteen in the labour

force are relatively low, but they

represent only the tip of the

Iceberg; many children work

unrecorded, whether for their own

parents or as paid labourers,

particularly in the world's rural

areas where they often work in the

fields or help with the housework.

In urban areas the children of the

poor comb the streets in search of

food and odd jobs. t «%**>v^.t.-.

Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, Director-General of Unesco

It is an oft-repeated truth that children are the hope of our world. Let us make sure during

the International Year of the Child, and in every year that follows, that the world's

children know how much we adults care about and work for their happiness. And let this

year's activities help us also better to understand children and to remember, when we

deal with them, what it was like when we were children. In this way we can avoid

inflicting the pain suffered by so many children in so many countries of the world. I

would like to think that when the International Year of the Child comes to an end, we will

be able to believe that our world has become more brotherly, more united, thanks to the

understanding we will have gained of children and the greater tolerance we will have

taught them.

k rediscovering how children create the

world anew through play. The role of this

most spontaneous of human activities in

the continuous re-creation of society by its

youngest members, is perhaps the major

discovery of the twentieth century.

If we go back to the pre-industrial era in

Europe, and to less industrialized Third

World countries today, we can see people

aged from ten to twelve and over functio¬

ning as adults with full responsibility for

themselves and contributing to the econo¬

mic welfare of family and workplace. The

film. Invention of the Adolescent, pro¬

duced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp¬

oration in 1970, documents the transition

from pre-industrial to post-industrial

society for children of the first world, and

shows how recent and contrived is our

¡mage of the adolescent as immature and

irresponsible.

At present, adults professionally concer¬

ned with children are somewhat confused

about what position they should take in

regard to child labour. Much of the spirit of

protection that we see in the 1970s stems

from the necessary drive to protect children

from the abuses of an earlier era of the

industrial revolution. Today's generation of

middle-class children in the urban areas of

both the more and less industrialized coun¬

tries are told to run and play, or to study

more. The children of the poor comb the

streets for odd jobs or adventure. Most of

these children feel trapped, whether in the

streets, in the playroom or in the school¬

room, and would love to have their own

job. Their despair is variously exhibited in

high frequencies of suicide, or drug and

alchohol use, and in rising school drop-out

rates.

Why this despair? Play is an empty word

in the absence of free spaces where a child

can shape her environment to suit her

needs and desires. A recent Unesco study

of urban children in different world regions

by Kevin Lynch, Growing Up in Cities,

brings this out with startling clarity.

The situation is different in the country¬

side. In the world's rural areas most chil¬

dren are expected to be at work by ten or

twelve years of age. In fact, they are fre¬

quently at work from the age of five. Boys

work in the fields, girls help with younger

children, and help in household and field

work also. They have always done so, from

earliest times. With urbanization, working

conditions become harderwhether in tra¬

ditional settlements or modern cities. In the

era of the 1970s, when a high social value is

set on keeping children in school, there is

little incentive to report child labour, and

most children work unrecorded, whether

for their own parents or as wage labourers.

If there has been confusion about poli¬

cies regarding children and youth in the

labour force, there has never been any con¬

fusion about policies regarding military ser¬

vice of young persons. Minors have always

been put into armies, and there have been

many teenage military heroes in history. A

substantial part of the burden of national

defence in the modern world therefore

rests on the shoulders of youth under

twenty-one.

We are so accustomed to legal and social

rhetoric about protecting minors that we

forget that a lot of the work of rearing and

protecting the young is done by persons

who are themselves still minors. In 1976,

delegates from thirty-nine countries atten¬

ded a Conference held in the U.S.A. on

Right, a young girl lavishes her

affection on something that was

once a doll. Almost thirteen

million of the sixty million

women who had babies in 1975

became mothers before they

became adults. Not only is the

adolescent mother physically at

risk, she also faces enormous

social and legal handicaps.

Unmarried teenage mothers and

their children. In particular, are

among the most disadvantaged

categories of minors despite the

fact that the first article of the

Declaration of the Rights of the

Child calls for equal rights for all

children regardless of the

circumstances of their birth.

adolescent fertility. According to the Con¬

ference report, entitled Eleven Million Teen¬

agers, close to 13 million of the 60 million

women who became mothers in 1975

became parents before they became

adults. Early child-bearing is increasing

everywhere, is emerging as a serious pro¬

blem in many countries, and has reached

alarming levels in others where it is associa¬

ted with serious health, socio-economic

and demographic implications for young

women, young men, their offspring, and,

indeed, for the whole society.

One significant aspect of teenage preg¬

nancy is that it is not simply a phenomenon

of less industrialized countries, but of the

most industrialized countries, with the Uni¬

ted States a leading producer of teen¬

age child-bearers. Childbearing before the

age of twenty involves high risk to the

mother, and considerably lowered chances

of survival for the infant. Yet in many coun¬

tries large numbers of teenage girls take

these risks, at least in part because their

status as minors prevents them from gain¬

ing access to the preventive measures they

CONTINUED PAGE 34

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8

Twenty lucky ones with

enough to eat in the

world today some 100

million children under the

age of five suffer from

malnutrition.

by Fernando

Monckeberg Barros

Cradled in hungerHalf the world's children under six

are victims of malnutrition

THE care and protection of children

has always been a major preoccupa¬

tion of human society, and this

concern has found expression in the atten¬

tion lavished on children during the early

part of their lives. Since human beings are

born helpless and without defence, the

species is of necessity endowed with a

strong maternal instinct.

As man has progressed and as society

has become more complex, the need to

extend this care and protection to older

children has become apparent. With the

increase of knowledge it has become evi¬

dent that the social environment is a key

factor in the all round development of the

FERNANDO MONCKEBERG BARROS, Chilean pae¬

diatrician and former professor at the universities of

Chile and Harvard, is the author of a large number of

articles and books on problems of food and nutrition,

many of which, such as his Checkmate to Underdeve¬

lopment, have been published in English. He has served

on severe! Unicef and World Health Organization com¬

mittees and is a member of many Chilean, Latin Ameri¬

can and North American scientific societies.

child and in his or her future prospects as

an adult. It is not surprising, therefore,

that, as early as 1924, the "Rights of the

Child" were proclaimed in Geneva or that

later, in 1959, these rights were unani¬

mously adopted by the United Nations.

Principle no. 4 of the Declaration of the

Rights of the Child refers specifically to the

care and protection of the child and the

mother: "The child shall enjoy the benefits

of social security. He shall be entitled to

grow and develop in health; to this end

special care and protection shall be pro¬

vided both to him and to his mother, in¬

cluding adequate pre-natal and post-natal

care. The child shall have the right to ade¬

quate nutrition, housing, recreation and

medical services."

However, as we reach the twentieth

anniversary of the United Nations Declara¬

tion, it must be admitted that the rights of

the child are by no means fully exercised

and that for far too high a proportion of

children they remain no more than a decla¬

ration of principle.

The enormous amount of knowledge

acquired and applied over recent decades

has resulted in substantial social advances

from which children as well as adults have

benefited. During the seventeenth century,

for example, the child mortality rate in

Europe is estimated to have been in the

region of 500 per thousand; already by the

end of the nineteenth century this had been

reduced to 200 per thousand. Recent esti¬

mates fix the current world infant mortality

rate at 98 per thousand, although it is true

that this average figure conceals variations

in rates ranging from 10 per thousand in

some countries to 200 per thousand in

others.

Nevertheless, as a result of the tremen¬

dous population explosion that has occur¬

red during the twentieth century, there

have never before been so many children

suffering from poverty and malnutrition. It

is estimated that 500 million people in the

world today, most of them children, are

suffering from malnutrition and that a fur¬

ther 2,000 million are suffering from under- .

nourishment. I

y Research carried out in recent years indi¬

cates that a child can be at risk from malnu¬

trition even before birth and that the

growth of the child within the womb

depends upon the mother's state of nour¬

ishment. The outward indication of this

condition is a sub-normal birth-weight

(below two and a half kilos). Whilst in

industrialized countries only two or three

per cent of children are born under-weight,

in the developing countries the proportion

is between twenty and thirty per cent.

These figures do not refer to premature

infants but to those suffering from pre¬

natal malnutrition as a result of inadequate

nourishment of the mother.

Children born under-weight run a very

grave risk of illness and death. Among

those that survive, abnormalities of growth

and development have been noted. In

many cases the head is smaller than

average and psychomotor difficulties are

apparent.

Today, many children are born into an

unfavourable environment. Lack of ade¬

quate food delays both their physical and

their mental development and reduces their

resistance to disease.

The most recent studies show that lack

of food is not the only problem; other fac¬

tors, such as lack of affection and of men¬

tal and social stimulation, also have a nega¬

tive effect on the child's intellectual and

physical development. Families living in

poverty are affected by all these factors.

Thus poverty in itself, with all that it

implies, is a direct cause of psychomotor

retardation in the child.

The sombre, crushing, twilight world of

poverty provides no stimulation for the

child's curiosity or imagination. It is a world

from which everything bright and colourful

is banished and in which games and other

stimuli so necessary to the development of

the child's natural capacities are exceed¬

ingly rare. Furthermore, the parents' lan¬

guage ability is often limited and their chil¬

dren lack verbal stimulation. The ties bet¬

ween child and adult are weak and, in

general, there is little common family acti¬

vity. Love and understanding are reduced

to a minimum and the child feels perma¬

nently unprotected and insecure.

As well as retarding psychomotor deve¬

lopment, all this affects the child's persona¬

lity and results in a lack of self-esteem. In

conditions of poverty the family structure

usually becomes heavily distorted; the

father's image is debased or is non¬

existent. Thus, in the end, it is the crushing

weight of poverty which causes retardation

of the child's psychomotor development

and which leads finally to what might be

summed up as "society-induced/

biological" damage.

It is this damage which later will make it

difficult for the child to become a fully inte¬

grated, useful member of society. In Latin

America, for example, of every hundred

children who manage to embark on primary

education only ten complete it. There are

many possible causes for this high drop¬

out rate, but the most important is the

intellectual limitation which prevents so

many children from matching up to the

requirements of a normal education.

There are several degrees of underdeve¬

lopment. In some countries the situation is

desperate; in others a certain level of deve¬

lopment has been achieved. The poorest

countries have been defined as those in

which the annual income per head of the

population is less than three hundred dol¬

lars. These countries account for fifty-six

per cent of the population of the develo¬

ping world and include: Afghanistan, Ban¬

gladesh, Burma, Cameroon, Ethiopia,

Ghana, Guatemala, India, Madagascar,

Mali, Mozambique, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri

It can today be asserted that approxima¬

tely half the children of the world under the

age of six present some degree of malnutri¬

tion and that, as a result, their health and

the development of their overall genetic

potential is endangered. This is clear evi¬

dence that the proclaimed rights of children

remain, in reality, a dead letter.

For the child, the family unit forms a

micro-climate, an ecosystem which, when

all its different elements are in harmony,

provides the setting for balanced, integra¬

ted development. On the other hand, when

the ecosystem is not in equilibrium,

because basic needs cannot be met, the

effect is disastrous for the child and will

probably lead to irreparable damage. The

child's possibilities for development are

limited and the child becomes an easy prey

to illness or to early death.

Estimated numbers of children aged 0-4 years suffering from severe or moderate protein-calorie malnutrition

(PCM) in three regions of the world

Region

Latin America

^Africa

1Asia (excluding China

and J

Total

Severe PCM

700 000.

2 700 000

6000000

I9400 000

I

Moderate PCM

9 000000

16000000

64000000

89000000

Total

9 700 000

18 700 000

70 000000

98400 000

Source : WHO Chronicle, No. 1 Vol 28, Jan 1974

Lanka, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and

Upper Volta.

In these countries, the percentage of

children suffering from the ravages of

poverty is very high. Thus, for example,

between twenty-six and fifty-four per cent

of children under six years of age suffer

from malnutrition and almost all of them

are affected by undernutrition to a greater

or lesser degree. Almost all of them are

retarded in their physical development as

can be seen from the fact that they are

below average height for their age.

In the other developing countries, the

percentage of severe to moderate malnutri¬

tion varies from fifteen to twenty-five per

cent.

In the developing world, a very high per¬

centage of families is unable to satisfy basic

needs: housing, education, cultural needs,

health and nutrition.

All these basic needs are important, but

paramount among them is the need to eat.

Why do so many families fail to meet this

need? There may be many reasons, but the

root of the problem is neither ignorance nor

lack of access to adequate foodstuffs, but

that such families simply do not possess

sufficient means to obtain a healthy and

balanced diet.

Ignorance or cultural barriers may com¬

plicate matters further, but a simple mathe¬

matical calculation is enough to show that

10

in most cases malnutrition is a result of low

family income. In this situation it is always

the child who suffers most, for he depends

on other people to provide him with food

and is growing so quickly that he needs a

high level of nutrition.

Studies of the diet of different social

groups in poor countries show that there is

a close link between the income of the

family and the amount of calories it con¬

sumes. Quality of diet, consumption of cal¬

ories and animal protein are directly propor¬

tionate to the level of income.

In the social structure of underdevelop¬

ment, incomes are almost always unjustly

distributed; the lion's share tends to be

concentrated among a small segment of

the population. Even so, this is not the

main reason why lower income groups are

unable to get an adequate diet. In almost all

developing countries (except for the oil-

producing countries) the revenues simply

do not exist. Even if the national revenues

of these countries were equitably shared

out, it would only be an equitable distribu¬

tion of poverty.

In the United States in 1970 the average

annual outlay on food was just over six

hundred dollars per head, a figure much

higher than the total average per capita

income in almost all the developing coun¬

tries at that time. Even today over half the

population of the developing world have an

income under three hundred dollars a year.

The average United States citizen

spends 16.8 per cent of his income on

food. In Latin America and India, however,

incomes are low and a much higher propor¬

tion must be devoted to food: 64 per cent

in Latin America and over 84 per cent in

India. Even so, 46 per cent of Latin Ameri¬

cans and 78 per cent of Indians consume

less than the number of calories recom¬

mended, by FAO (the Food and Agriculture

Organization of the United Nations) and

WHO (the World Health Organization).

There is no way for the children of the

poor countries to enjoy their rights to the

full unless there is a substantial increase in

the gross national product of these coun¬

tries and unless steps are taken to distri¬

bute national income more equitably within

them. As long as poverty and misery per¬

sist, the rights of the child will be nothing

but a piece of rhetoric.

As far as the future is concerned, the

biggest question-mark is that which hangs

over the size of tomorrow's world popula¬

tion. According to United Nations fore¬

casts, demographic growth between now

and the year 2000 will run at an annual two

per cent, which means that world popula¬

tion will rise from 4,000 million to 6,257 mil¬

lion. Of this increase, only 250 million will

be in the industrially developed world;

2,000 million will be in the developing

countries.

According to FAO figures, world foodw

production is theoretically sufficient to pro- f

Carlos Andrés Peréz, President of the Republic of Venezuela

In the Third World, to which our country belongs, more than fifty per cent of children

under six years of age suffer from some degree of malnutrition, thus indicating the sad

tragedy of the future. I believe that child care is an obligation for the whole world, and

that the industrialized nations should think of our children when they pay the prices of

our raw materials and when they sell us at extremely high and increasing costs the

finished products and capital goods which permit our progress.

vide adequate nourishment for everyone on

earth. In practice, however, the popula¬

tions of the rich countries currently enjoy a

diet which is usually much more than capa¬

ble of meeting their basic needs, while the

diet available to the people of developing

countries is totally inadequate.

The world's cultivated land today

amounts to 1,400 million hectares, and this

area could be extended to 2,300 million

hectares. Most of this virgin land is in

Africa and Latin America.

The yield of land now being cultivated

could also be considerably increased, but

attempts to boost productivity should be

largely concentrated in the developing

countries since yields in the rich countries

are already high.

It has been estimated that some 700,000

million dollars must be invested in order to

double food production between now and

the end of the century. Most of this must

go to the developing countries, which will

require an average of 32,000 million dollars

a year. They will be unable to find this out

of their own pockets, and the money will

have to come from the industrialized world.

The figure may seem high, but it is only

one-tenth of the world's current annual

expenditure on arms.

In the poor countries, insufficient food

output is only one aspect of a serious social

and economic problem whose complexity

varies from country to country. A variety of

conditions and problems are found in the

developing world. Some developing coun¬

tries are overpopulated, whereas in others

there is room for population growth. Some

dispose of abundant and unexploited

resources, others have practically none. In

some poverty and malnutrition are despera¬

tely serious problems, while others are in a

stage of "intermediate" development.

Some have a subsistence economy, others

have already embarked on industrialization.

In some the population is overwhelmingly

rural, in others the number of town- and

city-dwellers is mounting rapidly. Each

country has different prospects for the

future.

But whatever their situation, they all

need large-scale capital investment and

new technologies. The industrially develo¬

ped countries could provide this aid, but so

far they have been extremely reluctant to

loosen their purse-strings. Those who pos¬

sess an advanced technology do not find it

easy to give it away; on the contrary, they

use their know-how as an effective new

instrument for boosting profits.

And so if all the world's children do not

yet enjoy the "Rights of the Child", it is not

for lack of human ingenuity but because

mankind is not yet fully determined to fight

for the cause. The profound humanitarian

impulse which the task requires has not yet

been born. The necessary generosity and

willingness to make sacrifices for others

still do not exist. Is it too much to ask that

some give up a modicum of their comfort

so that the quality of life of others may be

improved?

In 1963 the General Assembly of the Uni¬

ted Nations recommended that the indus¬

trialized countries devote at least one per

cent of their gross national product to

helping the developing countries. Fifteen

years have gone by and this paltry sacrifice

is still far from a reality. None of the rich

countries is yet committed to devoting this

small proportion of their GNP to develop¬

ment aid.

Of course, this spirit of humanitarian

solidarity should not be confined to the

international scene; it should also infuse

developing countries where the few live off

the fat of the land at the expense of the

many who endure wretched living condi¬

tions.

History provides abundant examples of

mankind's immense capacity for solving

problems which once seemed insurmoun¬

table. Will mankind take up this challenge

and respond to this crisis of our times?

Today when the very existence of our spe¬

cies is threatened, the time has come to

transform hopes into realities.

Femando Monckeberg Barros

His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand

Older people, who have experience of life, have a duty to help and support those who

follow by transferring to them their knowledge, goodness and valuable experiences in a

sincere, compassionate and affectionate spirit. In this way the young will achieve

knowledge and understanding and most important of all will learn to reason correctly,

attaining an enlightenment which enables them to distinguish between what is

progressive and what is degrading.

"The little girl was scared to light the firecracker. Her brother was trying to give a helping

hand", ran the photographer's description of the scene below. Firework-time is only one of

many occasions when children must act with the utmost care. Every year many thousands

of young people die or are maimed in fires or explosions, on the roads, from drowning and

from accidents in the home. Photo is a prize-winning entry in a 1978 photo contest on the

theme of "Children of Asia" organized by the Asian Cultural Centre for Unesco in

collaboration with the Japanese National Commission for Unesco and several private

organizations in Japan.

Photo © Ee Hon Teck, Singapore

Thesting

in the

fairy

tale

by Jorge Enrique Adoum

Photo © R. Canessa, Toulon

IF, as has been said, more children have

been lulled to sleep by the gentle balm

of fairies' smiles than have been kept

quiveringly awake by the grimly staring

eyes of ogres, then perhaps it is time to

examine more closely the instructions for

use, the side effects and the contra¬

indications of this balm, this drug which,

since it was first imported two centuries

ago, has been the bed-time tranquillizer of

Latin America.

Fairy tales probably reached Latin Ame¬

rica towards the end of the eighteenth

century at the same time as such "contra¬

band" cultural shipments as the works of

the Encyclopédistes, the ideas of the

JORGE ENRIQUE ADOUM, Ecuadorian poet and

writer, has published several volumes of poetry, inclu¬

ding an anthology. Informe Personal Sobre La Situa¬

ción (Personal Report on the Situation, Madrid, 19731.

His play about the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire,

published in English as The Sun Trampled Beneath the

Horses' Hooves (The Massachusetts Review, Winter-

Spring 19741 has also been translated into French, Swe¬

dish and Polish and performed in several countries of

Europe and Latin America. He has taken- part in

Unesco's programme of studies on Latin America cul¬

tures, and is now a member of the editorial staff of the

Unesco Courier.

French Revolution and the Declaration of

the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. They

arrived so opportunely as a means of

shoring up the colonial regime whose

downfall this other literature was intended

to help bring about that it might well be

asked whether they were not deliberately

despatched with this aim by the Spanish

Crown.

Unlike Asia, the Latin America of that

time had no established literary tradition

(and tales for children should be conside¬

red as part of general literature) and, unlike

Africa, was not endowed with a particularly

strong oral tradition. The legends, myths

and traditions of the native Indians which

still survive in the countryside, though with

great difficulty since the Indian took ven¬

geance on his conquerors with the weapon

of silence are not, properly speaking,

tales for children. Passing, it must be sup¬

posed, from the wealthy Creole's library to

his children's nursery, thence via the wet-

nurse or the cook to other households,

fairy tales finally filtered down through the

country schoolteacher to reach the minds

and imagination of village children.

Charles Perrault's Tales of Past Time, by

Mother Goose not only marked the begin¬

ning of fairy-tale literature, but was the

example of it most widely distributed in

Latin America. Written in 1697, at the

height of French territorial expansion under

Louis XIV, when the author, a high functio¬

nary and former protégé of Colbert, was

sixty-nine years old, the Tales were signed

by his ten-year-old son Perrault d'Arman-

cour, dedicated to a princess and intended

for use at the court of Versailles.

Already the serpent can be discerned

coiled within the egg! Literature written by

an adult and imbued with the ideology of a

courtier, was presented as being the work

of a child, that is, for children and intended

for the edification and amusement of prin¬

cesses; its purpose is evident, the exalta¬

tion of the divine right of kings and the

inculcation of devotion to the institutions

this right represented and on which it

reposed.

Adults propagated and imposed these

tales on their children at their most vulnera¬

ble age, preferring them to others and erec¬

ting their own experience into an educatio-

13

nal standard and making education a bas¬

tion of the sovereignty of the grown-up.

Believing that these tales were edifying

they became veritable colonizers of the

infant mind.

It would be not only stupid but cruel to

demand of these stories an implacable real¬ism, thus denying men and, even worse,

children the right to dream. The child's per¬

ception of reality is more limited than that

of an adult, yet this does not mean that a

vast area of the child's mind is no more

than a desert; on the contrary, it is an area

peopled with images infinitely richer than

those that could be implanted there by the

impoverished imagination of an adult.

Because he lacks any basis for compari¬

son and judgement, the child tends to con¬

fuse the literary content of tales with

reality. Thus by imposing on the child an

imaginary reality which not only replaces

"real" reality but also his own fantasies,

the adult obliges him to identify himself

with characters and a context completely

outside his experience and which will be of

little use to him when the time comes for

him to face up to the problems of daily life.

"At one time or another", says Bruno

Bettelheim, "every child dreams of being a

prince or a princess." Yet what child of the

tropical plains or plateaux of Latin America

would ever have dreamed of such a thing if

these images had not been imposed upon

him, images made much more concrete by

Gustave Doré's at times gruesome engra¬

vings and Walt Disney's cloying cartoons

and made superficially more real by the

stage versions of these tales in which

schoolchildren are obliged to take part?

Given the authors and the immediate

audience for whom they were writing, the

kings and queens, princes and princesses

who figure in these tales were inevitably

generous and charitable, beloved of their

subjects and respected by their peers. They

had neither armies nor police forces (at

most a few kind-hearted gamekeepers) and

they never declared war. Only rarely were

their subjects sent to prison or to the exe¬

cutioner's block, and then only through the

spiteful machinations of a wicked step¬

mother. The queens and princesses,

moreover, were all remarkable for their

beauty. The young Latin American was not

slow in recognizing that, in comparison

14

with the realities of his life, all this was

nothing more than a huge adult lie.

In European fairy tales, which draw on

Scandinavian, German and Slav traditions,

the characters are naturally white-skinned,

blue-eyed and fair-haired (with the sole

exception of Snow White whose hair was

"as black as ebony"). Yet in Latin Ameri¬

can society, where economic discrimina¬

tion almost always goes hand in hand with

discrimination of a racial nature, the tacit

identification of this type of beauty with

goodness may have undesirable repercus¬

sions. Young indigenous and mixed-race

Latin Americans who, quite naturally,

reject this discrimination may tend to deve¬

lop a sense of inferiority, especially since at

school and in daily life they are already set

apart by the more or less white children

whose servants they often are.

In the Grimm brothers' version of Cinde¬

rella this identification is quite deliberate:

"this woman (the stepmother) had brought

with her two daughters who though beau¬

tiful and fair of complexion, were neverthe¬

less evil and black-hearted." In establishing

the exceptional nature of this case, the

"nevertheless" betrays the ideological con¬

tent of the sentence. If we were to turn the

phrase round and say that "the daughters,

though ugly and black-skinned were never¬

theless good and pure in heart", the racist

implication, however involuntary it may be,

would become brutally apparent. It is easy

to see why, for Latin American children.

"...what child of the tropical plains or plateaux of Latin America would

ever have dreamed of being a prince or princess if these images had not

been imposed on him...?" Photomontage shows European illustrations

in a Latin-American edition of the seventeenth-century French author

Charles Perrault's Fairy Tales.

¿SSari^y*

f *^fT H '* tF'/Sê^Mtih

W i i Al ^%

¿^^Êm^*

wä

*** Skt

vi

*^1!^ ^*v

BSEi ,

*1 _ « 1» - .

the most comforting, or at any rate the

least cruel, of these stories is Hans Ander¬

sen's Ugly Duckling.

Obedience to authority and for the

child authority means other people is

acceptance of one's fate; and one's fate is

the will of others. Male characters such as

Tom Thumb or Puss-in- Boots, although

submissive, are able to elude injustice or to

turn to their own benefit the absurd capri¬

ces of those in positions of power. But in

fairy taleswhich represent society in

miniature girls must obey and wait for

their obedience to be rewarded; thus their

feelings of impotence are reinforced. Cin¬

derella, submitting to the taunts of her

step-sisters, and Snow White, obliged to

live in hiding, are fine examples of patient

resignation, a virtue encouraged by the

establishment in a rebellious continent.

In fairy tales there are rewards and, more

in keeping with real life, punishments.

Bluebeard punishes his three wives' diso¬

bedience by taking their lives, although insome versions the youngest manages to

save her skin. Little Red Riding Hood was

swallowed up by the wolf despite the fact

that, in Perrault's version, she had been

guilty of no disobedience (nor, indeed, had

her grandmother). It was not until some

hundred years later that, mercifully, Ger¬

man peasant women and wet-nurses

invented the timely arrival of the huntsmen

and her recovery from the wolf's belly, an

invention which was incorporated in the

version recounted by the brothers Grimm.

It was then that she learnt that she should

not disobey her mother and stray from the

path when walking through the forest.

A vital element in this literature, this

ideology, is the solution of problems not by

human endeavour but by providential

means which constitute, moreover, the

reward for submission. A king's son trans¬

forms Cinderella's life, other princes do the

same for Snow White and Sleeping

Beauty, and a dragon and a soldier arrive in

the nick of time to save Bluebeard's third

wife. Two centuries later the situation is

brought up to date. At closing-time, a

humble washer-up in a bar sings at her

work and a film director seated in a corner

"discovers" her and makes her a film star.

Unfortunately there are very few Marilyn

Monroes; millions of young Latin American

match-sellers, goose-girls and Cinderellas

are destined only to become adult Cinderel¬

las. They have no fairy god-mother with a

. magic wand to free them from their toil and

change their rags into silken robes and their

sandals into glass slippers. They have no

prince to come to their rescue, not even a

more prosaic modern equivalent the son

of a President, of an industrial magnate or

of a banker. For most women the dream of

Cinderella becomes the harsh reality of

Snow White; if she wants a roof over her

head she can stay and be provided for so

long as she' is prepared to "make the beds,

cook, wash, sew, spin and keep everything

clean and tidy" for the dwarfs.

More than a century after the brothers

Grimm publicly acknowledged their debt to

the German peasant woman who had

recounted to them several times, with no

variations, the stories that were to become

Grimms' Fairy Tales, psychoanalysts have

observed how adamantly young children

demand to be told the same story over and

over again with nothing left out, altered or

toned down. It would seem that this repeti¬

tion gives children a feeling of security, of

certainty that there will always be a happy

ending; if each detail remains the same

Photo

H.W. Silvester

© Rapho,

Paris

Illustrations

© Editorial

Porrúa, S.A.,

Mexico City

throughout the narrative, there is no

reason to suppose that the ending will

change.

Think, for example of some unhappy

child from a large family (and in Latin Ame¬

rica a large family is almost invariably a

poor one) as he listens to the story of Tom

Thumb. Tom Thumb's parents "were so

poor that their seven sons [aged between

ten and seven] were a great burden to them

since none of them could earn a living...

They decided to get rid of them by aban¬

doning them in the depths of the forest".

Perhaps the fact that he and his brothers

and sisters have been earning at least a part

of their keep since the age of seven will

reassure the little Latin American boy, but,

paradoxically, his certainty that the ogre

will never eat them all up, that they are not

15

y going to get lost and will find their way

home is due to the fact that, in the story,

the birds always eat up the breadcrumbs

that Tom Thumb dropped behind him so as

to be able to find his way home again.

This tendency of the child and the

adult to identify with the characters in a

story and the absence of any incentive to

imagine different outcomes to similar situa¬

tions is what, according to the experts,

gives these tales their therapeutic value.

Because they provide solutions that are as

clear-cut and unambiguous as the child's

unconscious is said to be, the child can

use them to help him to solve various

psychological problems of insecurity and

fear; to master the oedipal impulse or to

reconcile the notion of pleasure with the

understanding of reality. This may indeed

be true, but this is not what we are con¬

cerned with here.

Nor is there any intention of belittling the

literary value of fairy tales or of denying

their virtually worldwide genealogical

Mark Twain and Selma Lagerlöf. But the

argument that fairy tales "cannot be harm¬

ful since they are a part of all the traditions

of the world" is fallacious. They do not

belong to all traditions, not all traditions are

necessarily good for children, and not

everything is good simply because it is tra¬

ditional. Are we not today trying to correct

a whole host of misconceptions about

many aspects of human beings and the

world precisely so as not to pass them on

to our own children only for them to make

the same mistake with their children?

When children who have learnt to read

have access to books, their dreams are fil¬

led with the adventures of Sinbad and

Aladdin, and later of Sandokan, Gulliver

and Robinson Crusoe. Those who cannot

read stick to comics and films about Buf¬

falo Bill, the Indian-fighter, or Tarzan, the

tracker-down of negros. Today, television

has bought heroes such as Superman and

Batman (no words strong enough can be

found to describe the system of values they

"...The young Latin

American was not slow in

recognizing that, in

comparison with the

realities of his life, all this

was nothing more than a

huge adult lie."

roots. Tom Thumb antecedents can be

found in Homer and Rabelais and in Etrus¬

can and Scandinavian legends; Puss in

Boots was foreshadowed in Saint Basil the

Great's Hexameron, in Gianfresco Strapa-

rola's Pleasant Nights, Tales for the Diver¬

sion of Ladies and Gentlemen and in the

Thousand and One Nights; Sleeping

Beauty was referred to by Herodotus; ver¬

sions of Bluebeard exist in French, Ger¬

man, Swedish, Gaelic, Greek, Finnish and

Catalan. Latin American students come

across them in the course of their general

education just as they get to know the

great names of a literature which is not

addressed to adolescents alone, such as

Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll,

represent) to even the remotest villages.

Here and there, a few grandmothers and

mothers still intone "Once upon a time...";

the younger, more educated mothers seem

to have given up this habit altogether, feel¬

ing that the symbolism of these tales no

longer corresponds to reality, or doubting

their pedagogical and therapeutic value.

The tale is ended.

Aware of the difficulty of creating a tradi¬

tion, writers in Latin America set out first to

decolonize children's literature. The Brazil¬

ian writer Monteiro Lobato probably holds

pride of place among these innovators.

Many others have devoted themselves to

the compilation of indigenous stories, tales

Leonid Brezhnev, Chairman of the Presidium of the

Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

Children are our future. They will carry on the cause of their mothers and fathers. I am

sure that they will build a better and happier life on earth. Meanwhile, our duty is to try

to ensure that children everywhere are spared war so that they may enjoy their childhood

in tranquillity and happiness. Our purpose is to teach children to be generous, to live in

friendship and as good neighbours with all people, regardless of nationality or colour, and

to work for the benefit of all people.

based on the Indian cosmogony or of Afri¬

can origin. But they seem to have had little

success with children, perhaps because

they are given scant attention in the school

or in the home, perhaps because the chil¬

dren are conditioned to expect a certain

style and content, or perhaps simply

because they have not yet acquired the sta¬

tus of a tradition.

Some Latin American writers have

published, with the best of intentions, new

stories and fables; unfortunately, many of

them seem to consider the child reader to

be mentally retarded if not a complete idiot.

Adopting a quasi-colonialist attitude, con¬

temptuous rather than paternalistic, they

offer the child cheap falsehoods wrapped

up in insipid, pretty-pretty baby-talk. This

is childish literature, not literature for chil¬

dren. Once they have seen on television

men landing on the moon, or the incredible

life of the under-water world, or a cowboy

destroying an entire army singlehanded, it

is easy to imagine what children must think

of those who persist in telling the story of

how Mr. Toad married Miss Frog.

Among those who avoid these pitfalls is

the Argentine poet and puppeteer Javier

Villafañe who roams the hamlets and villa¬

ges of Latin America asking children to

recount to him their own stories and expe¬

riences. These he brings to life again by

presenting them on the stage of his travel¬

ling puppet theatre. The children have the

feeling that they have created something

and, in fact, this is true.

Not long ago I was a member of a jury

judging a competition in Ecuador for sto¬

ries for children written by children aged

from nine to twelve. Almost eighty per cent

of the entries were immediately eliminated

as being no more than pale repetitions of

fairy tales or cowboy films. Was not this a

symptom of cultural colonization? But,

worse still, in those cases where the chil¬

dren had produced original stories, adults

had ruined them with their "corrections".

Was not this another way of silencing the

children?

In every country, children's painting is

encouraged as being one of the most spon¬

taneous and unaffected expressions of the

universe of the child. But children are very

seldom encouraged to express themselves

in words and their right to speak out is

hardly ever recognized. (Thirty years ago,

the Uruguayan writer Jesualdo published a

volume of children's poems which included

lines that any poet would have been proud

to have written).

Imagination is always more ferociously

repressed when it is expressed in the form

of language. We are not disturbed when

the child expresses his vision of the world

in bright colours and touchingly hesitant

lines; what bothers us is his opinion of our

conception of his reality. It makes us smile

when we see a vertical line topped by a cir¬

cle and with two horizontal and two ob¬

lique lines coming from it. After all, that is

what a man is like whatever his stamp or

breed; it is a drawing, a game. But our fear

of words reveals our fear of the truth. We

are afraid to hear the cry "the Emperor has

no clothes", since, as far as children are

concerned, the Emperor is each one of us.

Jorge Enrique Adoum

16

Deaf children live In a

world of silence but they

can "listen" to their

parents with their eyes.

Recent discoveries about

early childhood, stressing

the importance of the

gestures and facial

expressions which

accompany speech, are

being increasingly used

by parents and teachers

to help handicapped

children to acquire

communications skills.

The deaf child is trained

to follow the adult's line

of vision before lip-

reading his or her

comments.

The road

to self-expressionAwakening the latent language skills

of handicapped children

by Anne McKenna

ANNE McKENNA of Ireland is editor of The

International Journal of Early Childhood and lec¬

turer in the psychology department of University

College, Dublin.

LET us eavesdrop for a few moments

while a normal child talks to his

mother after he has just come out of

school. He rushes through the door and

runs to tell her what he has done since he

last saw her, in school and on the way

home with his playmates. His conversation

carries the outside world into the home,

and as his mother listens sympathetically

the various strands of his lifeschool,

home and friends come together for him

and interweave to make a new pattern and

a new world that he himself has fashioned.y

Such fortunate children who have been

brought up in happy homes and who pos¬

sess all their senses unimpaired have

taught us so much about the meaning of

the world for a child. In giving us these

insights, they have given us the opportu¬

nity to acquire a new perspective on the

rights of handicapped children on their

long voyage to adulthood.

We now know that children learn many

of the highly complex processes of com¬

munication in a very short time early in life,

long before they reach school age. During

a recent study of a pre-school programme

in a socially disadvantaged area of the United

CONTINUED PAGE 20

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19

Kingdom, parents were asked whether

the programme had helped their relation¬

ship with their children. About half of them

said that this relationship had improved

and most often they attributed this to the

child's increased verbal facility.

The children had learned new words

which had made it easier for their parents

to communicate with them; the pre-school

experience had apparently provided topics

for conversation. It may seem surprising

that parents and children living under the

same roof should need to be provided with

conversational themes, but the fact is that

there are many situations in which lan¬

guage is superfluous.

Eating and sleeping can be supervised by

the parent with a great deal of efficiency

and even affection, but with very few

words. To wrap up a child carefully against

the cold you do not need to talk about his

red jumper or blue jumper or to differen¬

tiate a woollen from a synthetic coat ; and

you can tuck him into bed at night without

talking about the sun, the moon and the

stars.

The language used on occasions like

these may often be a one-sided set of terse

instructions from parent to child, with an

almost total lack of dialogue. To engage in

dialogue with the child about the names of

things, to perceive, compare and classify

their qualities, to create imaginary and

hypothetical situations, to relate events in

time and space, to discuss the happenings

of a familiar story, and to talk about how

one feelsall of these activities and many

others which form the basis of a good pre¬

school programme, might also become

topics of conversation to try out with

mother as well as with teacher. In giving

the child conversational pieces to take

home, just as we would let him take home

his drawings, we are also giving the parent,

perhaps for the first time, an opportunity to

try out alternative topics of conversation.

But with the child who is handicapped in

language development by deafness, deve-

20

Above, four cards illustrating and explaining gestures from the sign-

language of the deaf. They form part of a set used in the Swedish TV

"Hands Up" programmes described in photo caption on opposite page.

Clockwise from top left, cards show gestures for: "thanktyou"; "please"

"meeting"; and "happy". More than 300,000 sets were sold at shops

throughout Sweden.

lopmental delays or low:level linguistic sti¬

mulation in the home, we must go back to

the beginnings of language. Early depriva¬

tion through any form of handicap, either

social or physical, can have far-reaching

effects and can result in irreversible

damage. On the positive side, early enrich¬

ment programmes can be highly effective if

they are appropriate to the child's age and

level of development.

What are the essential elements of a lan¬

guage programme for children who have

not yet acquired language? To answer this

question we need to know what the normal

child has to learn before he can begin to

speak. Before language is possible, we

must "learn to mean" as one linguist has

put it to make sense of the world and of

the people in itand what other people are

trying to do for us and ro us. This is the

journey that we embark on from the first

breath of life, and children have travelled

far along this road before speech begins,

indeed before speech can begin.

One of the first things we know to be

essential is the setting up between infant

and adult of a common ground, with the

adult looking at the same thing as the

infant and then commenting on it. This

immersion in the same subject, which the

American psychologist Jerome Bruner has

called "joint attention", is a precious com¬

modity for the language enrichment pro¬

gramme. It is in such conditions that we

see the precursor of language and it is to be

noted that the adult joins in the child's

attention rather than expecting the child to

join in his.

A mother does not say: "Pay attention,

this ¡s a hat", but when the child involunta¬

rily attends and looks with interest at his

daddy's head, so does mother, accom¬

panying this with words like "Oh! look at

daddy's lovely hat". Meaning for the child

is the total content of the event, the words,

the pointing finger, the smile on mother's

face and the question in her eyes. The

younger the child, the more handicapped

the child, the more important is this con¬

text where everything that is happening

around him is a clue to be snatched up if he

is to make sense of the world.

And if the speaker's face expresses

impatience at having to repeat the message j

for, say, a deaf child, this is what the situa- 1

"HANDS UPI" a highly imaginative series of Swedish TV programmes,

has encouraged thousands of children with unimpaired hearing to learn

the sign-language of the deaf. The programmes were intended not only

to break the "sound barrier" of communication with deaf youngsters but

to initiate other children into a fun language they could use for swapping

secrets, communicating in noisy surroundings or from a distance. An

episode of an adventure serial starring two deaf children and two

children with normal hearing was screened each week. Every instalment

contained a key sentence in sign language that the "Hearing" children

and viewers had to interpret. Viewers had an opportunity to familiarize

themselves with the gestures used in the broadcasts by a training

programme preceding each instalment and by a set of explanatory cards

(see opposite page). Top photo page 20: the children, with producer

Gunnel Linde, learn signs connected with one of the secret sentences.

Top photo this page: the boy with normal hearing is telling the deaf boy

what has happened to a key they are looking for. It has been dropped

into a pool and the deaf diver (middle photo) has been told by sign

language where to find it. Left, he breaks surface, key in hand.

21

No words neededl This

expressive gesture

clearly means Ugh!

Disgusting!

, tion "means" to the child. You may be

mouthing "Take off your coat", but the

frustration or irritation in your eyes is the

chief message the child is receiving. So too

much of the tone of your voice when

speaking to a blind child, like the press¬

ure of your touch, can underline or cancel

out a spoken message.

No sooner has the child acquired the abi¬

lity to speak a three- or four-word sentence

to get attention, to procure his wants, to

comment on a surprising change, in short

to steer him through all the practical inter¬

changes necessary for living, no sooner has

he acquired this basic minimum than he

shows a joy in experimenting with ¡t. Lan¬

guage becomes something to be played

with, an object to be investigated. And in

the normal course of events the child is the

initiator, pushing the adult into dialogue.

A recent study has revealed just how

active and initiating children can be. When

the spontaneous speech of four-year-old

children in their own homes was recorded,

in circumstances in which neither the

mother nor the child knew when they were

being recorded, it was found that the child

initiated speech to the mother twice as

often as she initiated speech to him.

This finding has caused all of us to think

again about whether we teach language to

a child or whether we set up a situation

which allows the child to teach himself,

and if we do, to ask what sort of situation

this should be.

Once the to and fro of real dialogue has

been established, it provides the frame for

the child to try out new speech interaction

patterns. Here is a sample from an actual

dialogue in which a three-year-old child is

showing active forward planning, which is

revealed when the adult does not say the

"lines" he has mentally written for her.

- (Child) Shall I read this?

(Mother) Yes please.

(Child) O.K. (pretending to read) There

are no monkeys.

(Mother) Aren't there?

(Child) No. Say why aren't there.

(Mother) Why aren't there?

(Child) Because there is only Jane and

Peter.

The question "Aren't there" asks only

for a "Yes" or "No" answer whereas a

question containing the word why asks for

a detailed reply, which in this instance the

child had already prepared and intended to

deliver. This is just one of many examples

from our tape recordings of a child, not

merely initiating speech but also structu¬

ring the form of the dialogue, a dialogue in

which the child is the leader and the adult

thejollower.

What are the implications of this for chil¬

dren who are going through the critical

early years in situations which are less than

¡deal? What kind of language enrichment

programme should we have for the deaf,

the socially and culturally disadvantaged,

the mentally handicapped child? We have

to recognize the great value and producti¬

vity oí those desultory and, to the adult

mind, apparently aimless exchanges which

go on between an apprentice speaker, a

child, and a skilled practitioner, an adult.

Furthermore, we should recognize that

such exchanges will not take place until the

child is sufficiently emotionally secure to

disengage from the practical world of real

life, to play and experiment with language

in his own way and at his own pace.

Are there situations in which the burden

of providing for the family is so overwhel¬

ming that the providers become sources of

anxiety for the child, to be avoided rather

than sought out for little chats? In those

cultures where the child becomes an eco¬

nomic unit of his family before he has mas¬

tered the language learning process, he will

no doubt precociously acquire the scaffol¬

ding of language, but will there be time and

interest his own and that of his

parents to draw out the richness of lan¬

guage that he possesses? The child needs a

listenera listener with plenty of time: one

who appreciates that language itself ¡s a

great adventure for the human spirit and

not just a tool to make children more con¬

forming, more hard-working or even less

talkative.

In this, the International Year of the

Child, we should be facing the fact that

each child is unique and be asking oursel¬

ves how we can compensate for the handi¬

caps from which many children suffer. For

example, many children living in high-rise

flats or overcrowded slums spend a great

deal of their day playing in groups with

other children on their balconies or in their

yards. When their home background offers

a low level of language stimulation, their

needs are surely for more frequent contact

with a responsive adult, an experience

which a child from a more privileged social

background might have in abundance

whilst missing out on the experience of

playing with children of his own age.

For the deaf child we have to examine

our current programmes to ensure that

they are bombarding the child from the ear¬

liest moment with symbolsspoken or

manualwhich he can experiment with

and manipulate. However we must not

make the error of assuming that language

is something "out there" to be poured into

a child so that it finishes up inside him.

Rather the task is to give the child sufficient

appropriate stimulation to trigger off his

own latent language-forming skills.

And for the mentally handicapped child

might not the task for our educators be to

appreciate that a child's utterance, no mat¬

ter how poorly expressed, is his own crea¬

tion, his own unique assembly, to be foste¬

red and cherished rather than to be correct¬

ed in accordance with adult standards?

And for the blind child who is not lacking in

linguistic competence, how can we ensure

that the words he uses are not mere empty

concepts, pseudo-words which lack the

sighted child's richness of meaning?

Such are the questions we should pose

in this International Year of the Child if we

are to ensure that all our children have the

best opportunities to develop fully.

Anno McKenna

Jimmy Carter, President of the United States of America

I would hope, as the world focuses its attention upon children, that all of us could

become much more knowledgeable about their needs, much more willing to assume

responsibilities for meeting those needs and that we might in a positive way assess the

unique opportunity to broaden the horizon of growth and enjoyment and the productivity

of ouf children's lives, both now and in the future.

22

Do it yourself toys have many times the appeal of the ready-made plaything and all the joy of creation and innovationcan be read in the face of the youthful artisan, right. In contrast, the adult-conceived bouncer, left, seems to evokeonly an expression of bored, passive acceptance.

Photo Kofod © Unicef

Mali

Making

toys

is

child's

Tanzania Photos © Antonio Gálvez, Paris

SUPERANNUATED cardboard

boxes, tangled pieces of string,

dusters that have seen better

days, redundant twists of wire, bottle-

tops and old tin cansso many of the

things grown-ups relegate to the rub¬

bish dump can be a treasure trove for

imaginative children m search of fun.

Usefulness is in the eye of the be¬

holder, and a dustbin may contain an

unlikely hoard of odds and ends from

which, once the magic wand of inge¬

nuity has been waved over them, a toy

or a game can be conjured.

This was clearly shown by an exhibi¬

tion of children's toys and games from

all over the world, organized by

Unesco and all its Member States and

held at Unesco's Paris headquarters in

November 1978, as a prelude to the

International Year of the Child. Fifty-

six countries, representing the cultures

of five continents, sent in 3,000 games

and toys, most of which had been

invented and made by children them¬

selves, the rest being produced by

local craftsmen. Nine hundred toys

were chosen for the exhibition, which

focused on three themes: toys and

play in the child's psychological deve¬

lopment; play and the child's relations

with the community (through folklore,

music and the other arts); and play in

education.

On these pages, some of the high¬

lights of the exhibition: forty toys dev¬

ised and made by children from forty k

countries. f

23

India Tunisia Chile

Brazil Indonesia

25

Morocco Malaysia

Photo Michel Claude/Unesco

Unesco's Director-General, Mr. Amadou-Mahtar

M'Bow, with two young visitors at the exhibition

"Toys and Games of the World", organized at

Unesco as a curtain-raiser to International Year ofthe Child 1979.

A moment of delight and concentration at a school in a Paris neighbourhood heavily

populated by migrant workers. When children from many different countries are brought

together, the classroom can become a seed-plot of international understanding.

What's in

a name?by Hélène Gratiot-Alphandéry

HÉLÈNE GRATIOT-ALPHANDÉRY, French specialist in child psychology, is honorarydirector at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris and teaches at the René Descartes

University. Her six-volume Traité de Psychologie de l'Enfant ("Treatise on Child

Psychology"), written in collaboration with R. Zazzo, was published by Presses Universitaires

de France, Paris, between 1970 and 1976.

ONE of the first things a child is

required to do in the famous Binet-

Sirnon intelligence test is to give

his name.

Children seem to know their names by

the time they reach the age of three. In

other words, three-year-olds are capable of

placing themselves in a given set of sur¬

roundings and of providing this indication

of where they belong in society.

But it would be arbitrary to consider a

child's ability to identify himself by name as

merely a sign that he has reached a certain

level of intellectual development. A name is

more than a label ; it is a token of a

person's individuality. It is by our names

that we are known ; we make a name for

ourselves in the world.

The French philosopher Ignace Meyer-

son made an analysis of the social function

of the name in which he highlighted the

importance of names in ancient societies.

"A child does not exist until it has been

named," he wrote. "The name both repre¬

sents and confers individuality. It is the

measure of the place which the group allots k

to the individual and of the protection it F

27

The ¡mage the migrant

worker has of the host

country, based on

fantasies about its

wealth, comfort and way

of life, contrasts painfully

with the discomfort of

the shanty-town in which

he often finds himself

living. He feels isolated

and excluded. But his

children have additional

problems to face. If they

do not go to school, they

remain entirely dependent

upon their family and

their social development

is retarded. If they go to

school, they are plunged

into a strange

environment and a

bewilderingly wide range

of activities and

relationships with other

children and adults for

which they are totally

unprepared.

Photo H.W. Silvester © Rapho, Paris

28

k affords him. .. It is a big moment, for exam¬

ple, when his signature begins to carry

weight. A name represents and confers a

very special kind of identity: to give a child

the name of a forebear is to give the fore¬

bear a kind of continuity and even, in a

sense, to transform the child into the fore¬

bear." Meyerson goes on to make the point

that people sometimes change their names

when they change their social status, or

when they are in danger and want to cover

their tracks.

Meyerson also recalls that in Ancient

Greece and Rome, anyone such as a son,

a daughter or a slave placed by birth in

the power of another person, had no name

of his own. He was given that of the house

to which hé belonged.

But this link between the person and his

name is more than just a footnote to his¬

tory; psychological studies reveal that a

child's name has a bearing on the for¬

mation of his personality.

There is a time in early childhood when a

child amuses himself by becoming first one

personality and then another. Then comes

a moment when he speaks of himself as a

single person; the words / and me are con¬

stantly on his lips. This personality crisis,

which occurs around the age of three, is an

affirmation of selfhood and individuality,

which is expressed as opposition to others.

The child's given name is a crucial factor

in this assumption of individuality. It sin¬

gles him out from others and also indicates

his sexchildren tend to take a poor view

of given names which can be used for boys

and girls alike. The given name is more per¬

sonal than the surname. The child learns it

first and uses it in his earliest contacts with

others. It is used by his brothers and sisters

and his playmates. The surname indicates

attachment to a group and offers less per¬

sonal information to the outside world.

Both names assume great importance

when the child steps out of the family circle

and enters the world of school. When a

child utters his name he introduces himself,

exposes himself to the scrutiny of others.

At this point it becomes apparent that there

is a difference between "local" names and

"foreign" names, especially the given

names which are used by the teacher and

the other children. The foreign child is dis¬

tinguished by his given name just as much

as, if not more than, by the colour of his

skin, his hair and his eyes. Now perhaps

more than at any other time he realizes that

he is in some way different from the other

children.

This difference may be oppressive. It

may lead the child to behave aggressively,

to adopt a negative attitude to life, or to cut

himself off from other people. It may also

lead him to make some kind of appeal to

others those others who are both so near

to him and yet so unlike himself. His name

has taken on a far wider significance: it

denotes a country, a homeland.

I OME years ago, Jean Piaget

and Anne-Marie Weill traced the way in

which the idea of the homeland originates

and develops in the child's mind. Around

the age of six the child is still unable to

detach himself from his immediate circle,

but between ten and thirteen he acquires a

broader conception of the national group,

together with an understanding of the ele¬

ment of give-and-take in human relations.

"From the affective point of view", Piaget

has written, "the child initially shows no

preference for his own country over others

(what counts is the immediate unit such as

the family or the home town). Then, once it

is accepted that he belongs to a given

country, he imagines that anyone born

elsewhere would want to belong to the

same country too, if only he had the

choice. It is only when the child is on the

threshold of adolescence that he starts to

feel real patriotic sentiments, which he jus¬

tifies by reference to his birth and his

family. He believes that everyone prefers

his own country for the same reasons".

But logically satisfying though this analy¬

sis is, it does not do full justice to the

intense emotions which the idea of the

homeland evokes in those who live in exile.

When questioned about his nationality, a

child living in a host country conjures up an

image, which may be either fantastic or

nostalgic, of a faraway land where he may

never have set foot. For him the right to a

homeland means the right to say that he

comes from "somewhere else". The chil¬

dren and often the adults who question

him are at home; he is not.

He may realize that he has been up-

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, President of France

It Is my hope that this year the smiles of children will light up the world and give us faith

and conviction in our struggle for peace and progress.

Childhood is the innocence of the world, the marvellous fountainhead from which nations

draw energy, courage and joy. It is from children's wonder and curiosity that springs the

desire for change, without which our world would grow old and rigid.

rooted, either because he has heard his

parents say so or because he still remem¬

bers a country where he lived, played and

spoke in his own language. But whether

this memory is based on real experience or

whether it is a figment of his imagination, it

is overshadowed by a much more impor¬

tant problem. Every day of his life the

foreign child must cope with the fact that

he belongs to two countries at once.

Beneath the scrutiny of other people he

becomes aware of his identity. In relation

to other people he feels either a friend or an

outsider, depending on the circumstances.

Other factors as well as name, language

and physical type combine to immure the

foreign child in his foreignness. He soon

sees that his life is different in many res¬

pects from those of the children he meets

each day: his living conditions are different,

so are the social and economic status of his

parents and his family's customs and edu¬

cational models. He sees how groups form

according to nationalities and even regions

of origin; and both he and his family expe¬

rience the warmth and security of these

groups, through which he discovers a

homeland of whose landscapes, traditions

and recent history he is ignorant.

The foreign child's image of the home¬

land is thus an ambivalent one. It inspires a

lasting fidelity; he may hope to return there

one day; perhaps some members of his

family still live there. At the same time his

picture of this country may be coloured by

the fact that he has been compelled to

leave it because of poverty or oppression.

In the course of his psychological and

social evolution the child is constantly

making choices, and in this situation he

faces problems which make choosing

extremely painful or even impossible. He is

not equipped to choose between the

country in which he lives and whose cul¬

ture he is acquiring and the country to

which he "belongs". Or else he dares not

choose. Other people, however, do the

choosing for him.

The American sociologist Otto Klineberg

has shown how national stereotypes form

in the child's mind. Many factors are invol¬

ved in this process, including the image the

child has of himself, the image he forms of

others, and the image others form of him.

All these judgements are influenced by fac¬

tors which reflect the insecurity of the

foreign child and his unfailing need to be

recognized and accepted for what he is.

At school foreign children experience dif¬

ficulties of adaptation which all too often

produce a false, distorted picture of their

abilities and their potential. In some

schools they even outnumber and tend to

drive away the other children. As a result

the authorities may apply the principle of

"tolerance thresholds", a measure which

may in itself accentuate the cleavages bet¬

ween nationalities and which certainly does i

not foster "universal brotherhood". I

29

k If the foreign child feels that he is diffe¬

rent from children of the host country, he

also feels different from other foreign chil¬

dren whose nationality is different from his

own. He discovers that being a foreigner

does not necessarily bring you closer to

other foreigners. What he shares with

other foreign children is essentially a wish

to be accepted and to give a good account

of his country of origin, and above all, as

he grows older, a half-formulated desire

not to be an intruder or a parasite.

The child does not work all this out

alone. He gradually absorbs what he hears

at home and learns from the experiences of

his family. But these feelings eventually

become a part of him and influence what

he expects from the world.

The problem is not so much the child's

distinctive cultural situation as the way in

which this situation is appreciated and

valued. The child seeks recognition of his

right to a homeland but he also wants his

homeland to be considered as equal to any

other and worthy of an equally strong

attachment.

But is it not time we realized that such

terms as "the children of migrant workers"

or "the children of refugees" actually

sound like a denial of the right to a home-

One out of every two of the estimated ten

million refugees in the world is a child.

Among the 30,000 refugees from

Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) who have reached

shelter in Zambia, either directly or via

Botswana, seventy per cent are children

or adolescents of whom some 12,000 are

of school age. This has placed a huge

burden on the Government of Zambia

which, with the help of the Office of the

United Nations High Commissioner for

Refugees, has established camps and an

educational centre for young

Zimbabweans not far from Lusaka. Above,

Zimbabwe refugee children in Zambia.

Top left, improvised living quarters for

boys at the H.Z. Moyo Camp. Left, a class

for some of the 5,000 girls housed at the

Victory Camp.

30

^/4¿í

/ ét^r

\

>r

land because they associate the children

with the terminology of distress and flight?

Is it not high time to do away with such

oppressive labels? Should we not insist

that the social services and the bureau¬

cracy cease to mark out these children

from the rest? After all, no distinctions are

imposed on people who move about within

a single country. From north, south, east

and west they come, bringing with them

their own traditions and ways of speech.

But they are not given a special social or

professional status.

- i >Photos Peter Marlow © Sygma, Paris

Should we not recognize at once that

foreign children have a right to a homeland

of their own? They may be Algerians,

Argentinians, Chileans, Spaniards, Italians,

Ivorians, Laotians, Moroccans, Portu¬

guese, Senegalese, Tunisians or Yugo¬

slavs. Let them be recognized as such from

the moment they set foot in the host

country. Their dignity and their hope will

grow out of their legitimate pride in their

name and their homeland.

Hélène Gratiot-Alphandéry

Kenneth Kaunda, President of the Republic of Zambia

To the grown-ups, I would say this. Talk with children, and not just to them. Listen to

what they have to say. Respect their right to be heard. Give them a proper place in our

world village. Help them to play their role in our great family. Above all, let them teach

you what you have perhaps forgotten understanding, tolerance, friendship, peace and

brotherhood, and above all love.

31

Children

in the never,

never land

of exile

WHENEVER men and women are

forced to go into exile, violence

is inflicted not only on them but

on their families and especially on their chil¬

dren, who are caught up in a situation that

is beyond their grasp» The plight of these

"indirect" victims of political repression

has all too often been overlooked.

When children see their parents put

under arrest or when they visit their parents

in prison, they are the witnesses and some¬

times even the victims of ill-treatment by

the police. When their parents go into

hiding, they are subjected to sudden

upheavals and are torn away from their

schools and their friends. They may have to

endure separation from one or both

parents for a considerable time. If they

manage to go into exile, they have to leave

behind them their customs, their language

and those they love, and then face the

demands abruptly placed on them by their

adopted country.

Three other factors aggravate the effects

of these bitter experiences. In the first

place the children are either fed with con¬

fused or insufficient information about the

events which led to their predicament. This

may be a deliberate attempt to stop such

data from getting out or it may stem from

the difficulty of formulating the kind of

explanations that children can grasp.

Secondly, exile represents a break in conti¬

nuity and prevents the family from making

any definite plans for the future. Thirdly,' it

imposes a constant strain on the parents,

leading to quarrels and separations which

add to the children's feelings of insecurity,

deprivation and helplessness.

In general, it seems that while the chil¬

dren do not experience any major problems

as far as their intellectual development or

their learning processes are concerned,

their imagination suffers: they tend to imi¬

tate rather than create.

By giving substance to fantasies bound

up with the repression of desires, expe¬

rience of political repression and exile may

inhibit, sometimes to a marked degree, the

children's ability to give expression to their

fantasies and to engage in creative think¬

ing. The likely outcome of this is that their

imaginative work will deteriorate in quality

and that the range of their imagination will

diminish.

This deterioration is also reflected in their

powers of oral expression. Their vocabu¬

lary becomes impoverished and deficient in

all those figurative turns of phrase, compa¬

rions and adjectives that enrich linguistic

expression. This happens whatever lan¬

guage the children speak in the host

country.

No disturbances were observed in the

children's perception of situations nor in

their capacity to express these perceptions.

However, many children tended to make

lists of concrete items of information but

could only establish partial relationships

between them and were reluctant to sug¬

gest possible explanations for such rela¬

tionships.

In various tests performed to assess gra¬

phic representation, oral expression and

play, the children displayed a marked

tendency to simplify and were extremely

wary of using their imagination.

Two possible explanations for this emer¬

ged from interviews with the parents, who

confirmed that their children also showed

signs of an impoverished imagination in

their everyday lives. The first was that the

children were cut off from communication

and the kind of information which might

enable them to draw a clear-cut distinction

between fantasy and reality; the second

was that speech, even the utterance of

their own name, might have been dange¬

rous for them at some particular time when

they were in hiding. The parents stressed

the role that imagination played in their

own political activities and underlined the

difficulty of reconciling their own creative

activity with the realities of their situation

as exiles; as for the children, their urgent

need to adapt to life in exile was stifling

their creativity.

The children made an enormous effort to

adapt to school and to their new environ-

This text presents the conclusions of a major

study by a group of psychologists on fifty chil¬

dren ofpolitical exiles living in Europe. The study

was carried out under the auspices of a Paris-

based welfare organization, the Comité Inter¬

mouvements auprès des Evacués.

Marshal Tito, President of the Socialist Federal Republic

of Yugoslavia

There is nothing so noble as working for the welfare and happiness of children, not only

in one's own country but in every corner of our planet. Caring for children and ensuring

their protection and welfare, is an integral part of the struggle for progress, for better

understanding and friendship among peoples, for the happiness and prosperity of all.

32

The child of a political exile unconsciously sees his father as a man

rejected by his country and reduced in status by the stigma of punishment.

These drawings by the five-year-old child of a Latin American family living

in exile in France show the mother as the most substantial figure of the

family with the father a diminished background figure.

ment and did not come up against any

major obstacles. However, their desire to

imitate was so strong that they adapted in a

submissive, accepting fashion, playing very

little part in what went on around them and

rarely taking the initiative. The parents felt

that this stemmed from a conflict between

the children's need to adjust to their envi¬

ronment and their desire to remain faith¬

ful to their country, political creed and

language.

When the children played, told stories or

drew pictures, they tended to simplify and

to steer clear of difficulties. They stuck to

straightforward description, conventional

forms and expressions, and gave an

impression of isolation. Such characteris¬

tics were closely linked to the profound gap

which had opened up between "here" and

"there", between "now" and "then", bet¬

ween pleasure and duty, play and reality.

The parents were familiar with these

aspects of their children's behaviour and

put forward several explanations for them:

the absence of dialogue between adults

and children; the stereotyped language of

political ideology; reliance on grand¬

parents; the tug-of-war between the need

to adjust to a new set of circumstances

and loyalty to their background; and a

whole series of factors stemming from the

contradiction between the social origin of

militant activity and its orientation.

The parents needed help because they

were living in hiding, and this led them to

rely either on their families or on relief orga¬

nizations. Persecution and dependence of

this kind encouraged a regressive pattern

of behaviour which compromised the chil¬

dren's image of their parents.

Repressive measures against a specific

group creates a climate of violence which

affects the whole community. People were

thus inclined to treat the persecuted as

social outcastsand this rejection in itself

stigmatized them as guilty. Children derive

their values from other people, and these

youngsters were at a loss to understand

how those who had been rejected by

everyone else could possibly be "good".

In exile, however, activism may be more

highly thought of, either through demons¬

trations of solidarity with the exiled militant

or because the host country confers on him

or her an aura of prestige. The child's

impressions of his "double life" become

even more sharply divided between the

claims of the past and the present, home¬

land and adopted country, reality and

myth, and give rise to a welter of imagery

and ambivalent ideas.

In most cases, the parents' ideological

outlook did not coincide with the interests

of the class to which they belonged, still

less with those of the grandparents, who

often looked after the children when the

parents were in hiding. The children may

accordingly be expected to inherit the same

contradictions and ambivalences as their

parents experienced in relation to their own

fathers and mothers.

The father figure, reduced to the status

of a child by the stigma of punishment,

may no longer prove capable of represen¬

ting authority, and the child may look

elsewhere for another person or an institu¬

tion to fill the gap. Institutions, however,

are unable to bestow the affection with

which the family tempers the severity of its

authority and leaves room for the individual

to exercise his freedom.

Children of exiles receive a barrage of

information and value-judgements which

are often incoherent and contradictory.

When they try to work out for themselves

clear, comprehensive and objective rules of

conduct and honesty, they have a hard

time reconciling the treatment meted out to

their parents with the general climate of

opinion and their own appreciation of

events.

Tests on the children showed that their

image of the fathers tended to diminish,

both physically and in terms of his autho¬

rity and of his fitness to perform his role.

Given the facts of life in exile, this diminu¬

tion of the father's authority rarely seems

to be motivated by aggression. On the con¬

trary it appears to be a way of preserving

the father as a real person and of keeping

him close at hand, alive and well. The

parents confirmed the existence of this atti¬

tude, which avoids direct conflict but

causes the members of the family to be¬

come isolated from each other.

The children's drawings showed signs of

isolation and inability to communicate;

they brought out the failings of every mem¬

ber of the family, especially the father who

was shown as a shadow of his real self.

The figure representing the mother was

more substantial and often taller than that

of the father.

Success was the most important thing in

life for these children, although the yard¬

stick of achievement power, money or

dominancewas not clearly defined. At

the same time there was a tendency to

downgrade the idea of conflict and to avoid

all opportunities for acts of heroism. Sub¬

mission was extolled and rationalized as the

most intelligent way of solving conflicts,

which were regarded as evil by nature.

The children had a certain regard for

argument as a form of combat, but the out¬

come or conclusion was always glossed

over, so that the issue of whether or not

reason was actually effective was left

unsettled. The ideas behind the reasoning

were based on such liberal premises as the

defence of human rights, strikes for higher

wages, the defence of the environment,

and were always postulated in relation to

the host country.

33

Two thousand million childrenContinued from page 8

could employ if they knew about them. In

no society does minority status make

sexual activity inaccessible, whatever the

official norms might be.

The onset of fertility ranges from the age

of ten to the mid-teens. One of the trage¬

dies for girl children is that while the majo¬

rity of them live in countries where family

planning services are available and abortion

is legal under certain conditions, the ten-

to-fifteen year olds who are at risk of preg¬

nancy almost never have access to these

services.

The responsibilities of the teenage mar¬

ried woman who is also a mother may be

light compared to the responsibilities of the

teenage unmarried mother. A majority of

these young women keep their babies, and

have their lives programmed for them in

terms of the double task of working to sup¬

port the mother-child household, and of

being sole parent to the child. Economic

support from the father, even if paternal

filiation is legally established, is rare.

Unwed adolescent and teenage mothers

and their illegitimate offspring are among

Bibliothèque

Nationale

honours

Leopold Sédar

Senghor

An exhibition illustrating the life and

works of the Senegalese poet and

statesman Leopold Sedar Senghor is

currently being held (23 November

1978 to 18 February 1979) at the

Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The

exhibition traces Senghor's life from

his schooldays in Senegal and Paris,

where he was a classmate of the late

President Georges Pompidou,

through the pre-war years ofintellectual and creative ferment

when France "discovered" African

culture, up to the independence of

Senegal and Senghor's emergence

as a national leader and a world-

respected statesman. From his

earliest childhood Senghor has felt a

spontaneous affinity for the French

language, but his inspiration is

drawn from the poets of his native

Africa. This cultural mixture, so dear

to his heart, has given a unique

flavour to his writing, through which

runs the constant thread of the

search for and definition of the

concept of "Négritude". At the close

of the exhibition Mr. Senghor is to

donate a number of manuscripts and

illustrated editions of his works to

the Bibliothèque Nationale.

the most disadvantaged categories of

minors. While the United Nations Declara¬

tion of the Rights of the Child guarantees

whatever rights there are to all children

regardless of birth, in fact only twenty-two

countries recognize one status for all chil¬

dren whatever their circumstances of birth.

In all the rest, both the unwed mothers and

their illegitimate children carry lifelong

handicaps.

In the industrialized countries, the

increase in the number of school years has

brought about a prolongation of childhood

and of the child's dependence. Conse¬

quently adults have gradually come to for¬

get the roles that children and youth have

always played in social change. And yet the

young are everywhere at work, helping to

create alternative structures in community-

based movements the free schools, the

people's clinics, the refuges for children

who fear to live with their parents. The time

has come when we must cease to under¬

estimate their competence and skills.

Elisa Boulding

Bookshelf

UNESCO'S LITERATURE

TRANSLATIONS SERIES

India

D One Hundred Rural Songs of

India, translated into English verse by

K.P. Bahadur. Motilal Banarsidass

publishers, Delhi. 1978. 198 pp. (Rs. 80).

Egypt

(Contemporary Arab Authors Series)

D The Cheapest Nights and Other

Stories, by Yusef Idris. Translated by

Wadida Wassef. Peter Owen Ltd., Lon¬

don, 1978. 196 pp. (£5.25).

Iran

(The Persian Heritage Series)

D Iskandarnamah, A Persian Medi¬

eval Alexander-Romance, translated by

Minoo S. Southgate. Columbia Univer¬

sity Press, New York, 1978. 237 pp.

OTHER UNESCO BOOKS

AND PERIODICALS

D Educational Reforms and Innova¬

tions in Africa. Studies prepared for the

Conference of Ministers of Education of

African Member States of Unesco. Case

studies from Senegal, Mali, Tanzania,

Benin, Togo, Ethiopia, Somalia and

Kenya. 1978, 77 pp. (12 F).

D Some Suggestions on Teaching

about Human Rights. A teaching

manual showing how educators at diffe¬

rent school levels have introduced the

theme of human rights Into classwork.

2nd impression 1978, 155 pp. (10 F).

D The Book in Multilingual Coun¬

tries, by Abul Hasan. (No. 82 in

Unesco's "Reports and Papers on Mass

Communication" series). 1978, 40 pp.

(8F).

D Cultural Policy in Sierra Leone, by

Arthur Abraham. 1978, 75 pp. (16 F).

D Experiments in Popular Education

in Portugal 1974-1976, by Alberto Melo

and Ana Benevente. (No. 29 in Unesco's

"Educational Studies and Documents"

series). 1978, 45 pp. (8 F).

D Towards a Cultural Policy for

Honduras, by Alba Alonso de Quesada.

1978, 73 pp. (14 F).

D Basic Services for Children: a

Continuing Search for Learning

Priorities-ll, Studies of innovative edu¬

cational services for underprivileged chil¬

dren in developing countries. (No. 37 in

the International Bureau of Education's

"Experiments and Innovations in Educa¬

tion" series). 1978, 229 pp. (28 F).

D Unesco's international quarterly

Impact of Science on Society for

October-December 1978 (Vol. 28, No. 4)

contains the second instalment of a two-

part series on Integrated Technology

Transfer. (Each issue: 12 F; subscrip¬

tions 40 F for one year or 66 F for two

years).

34

Just published by Unesco

The latest (22nd) edition of Unesco's

international guide to study abroad,

covering the academic years

1979-1980 and 1980-1981

Lists over 200,000 offers of scholarships, assistantships,

travel grants and other forms of financial assistance available

throughout the world for study at post-secondary level in a

wide range of academic and professional fields.

Provides easy-to-use information on who can study,

what subject and where, details of each award including

how and where to apply.

The international course section has been considerably

augmented and now contains entries for study in over one

hundred countries under the auspices of some thousand

national and hundred international organizations.

716 pages Composite: English/French/Spanish

38 French francs

o»

xk A ^o

wresco

Where to renew your subscription

and place your order for other Unesco publications

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75700 Paris, France

newsunesco

Role of Unesco Strengthened by

General Conference Decisions, Declares Director-General

"The spirit of co-operation and the

desire for consensus emerge

strengthened from the twentieth session

of the General Conference" declared

Unesco's Director-General, Mr.

Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, in his final

address to the Conference.

A central element in the session, he

said, had been the Declaration on

Fundamental Principles Concerning the

Contribution of the Mass Media to

Strengthening Peace and International

Understanding, Promotion of Human

Rights, and to Countering Racialism,

Apartheid, and Incitement to War.

"The ovation with which this

Declaration was adopted," he said,

"will without doubt remain one of the

most intense and moving moments that

I have experienced as Unesco's Director-

General. This happy issue is all the

more remarkable because the probability

of failure was so high. It is an

illustration of the triumph of a patient

desire for conciliation which never let

up."

The Director-General also stressed

the significance of the adoption by

acclamation of the Declaration on Race

and Racial Prejudice. "For the first

time in the United Nations system," he

said, "and even in the history of

mankind's long efforts to banish the

spectre of racism, the international

community will dispose of a text which,

without being legally binding, represents

a moral engagement covering all aspects

of the problem."

The General Conference, which was

presided by Mr. Napoleon LeBlanc of

Canada, ended its work on November

28th after approving the Organization's

programme for 1979 and 1980. To carry

out the programme, the Conference

voted a budget of $303 million, an

increase of six per cent compared with

the budget for 1977 and 1978.

In the field of education the

Conference stressed the importance of

forward-looking reflection so that

Unesco can assist governments in the

renewal or development of their

educational policies and long term

plans. In this connection, the 37th

International Conference on Education

to take place in Geneva this July will

have as its theme the improvement of

the organization and management of

education systems. Two regional

conferences on policies and cooperation

in education are foreseen: one for Latin

Mr. Napoleon LeBlanc of Canada (right),

president of the 20th session of the Unesco

General Conference, receives a copy of the

100th record issued in the Unesco Collection

of Traditional Music, from Director-General

Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow. The presentation

took place during a musical evening

sponsored by the International Music

Council. At left is Mr. Leon Davico, Unesco

director of public information.

America and the Caribbean in

December 1979, and the other for the

European region in 1980.

Regional networks for educational

innovation set up in Asia, Africa, the

Arab States and Latin America will be

reinforced, and the International

Institute for Educational Planning and

Unesco's Regional Offices for

Education will employ new resources in

the training of educational personnel

able to help the progress of endogenous

development meeting the needs of

different societies and respecting their

cultural values. New educational

industries will be encouraged to provide

children and young people with

adequate school equipment, especially

textbooks in their mother tongue which

reflect more exactly the needs and

aspirations of the communities to which

they belong.

At the same time, the programme

stresses the need for a closer link

between schools and other educational

forces in the context of lifelong

education. It includes a series of

projects on behalf of girls and women,

of children who do not go to school at

all or who leave school early, as well as

for some urban populations who are

particularly disadvantaged such as

refugees and migrant workers. Other

fields where new initiatives are called for

under the programme include the

struggle against illiteracy, the

contribution of Unesco toward

integrated rural development, and the

promotion of physical education and

sport.

The Conference called for a marked

increase in Unesco's activities in science,

both to promote general progress of

science and technology and to cooperate

with States using these as tools for

development. Unesco is playing an

important role in the organization of the

United Nations Conference on Science

and Technology for Development, to be

held this August in Vienna, and as a

contribution to this it will convene in

Paris at the end of May the Second

International Conference on Scientific

and Technological Information in the

Service of Development (UNISIST II).

Among Unesco's fields of action in

the area of science will be the

encouragement of research aimed at

meeting the needs of each society, the

training of specialists and technicians

and the extension of science teaching

adapted to national requirements.

Unesco's Regional Offices for Science

and Technology enable the Organization

to take account of the diversity of

various situations and to aid States to

plan their own science policies and

adapt them to regional or international

endeavours.

The large-scale intergovernmental

research programmes in which Unesco

participates with the support of the

international scientific community will

be marked by new advances in such

fields as the earth sciences, ecology,

hydrology and oceanography. A special

effort will be made in the fields of

informatics and energy

sources particularly solar energy.

Unesco's social science programme

has been conceived along three main

axes: assuring the progress of these

disciplines in the world; promoting the

methodological possibilities of applying

them, and working to make them

contribute effectively in the quest for

solutions to the problems of human

rights, the strengthening of peace, the

study of development and of the

environment, the status of women and

young people and questions of

population.

During the next two years Unesco

plans to give a new impetus to the

teaching of human rights at all levels of

education. In addition, studies will be

undertaken on the scope of existing

human rights and the development of a

possible new category of rights related

to the requirements of a new

international order. Scientific research

on problems of peace and conflict will

also be stepped up and an international

congress on education in favour of

disarmament will be organized next

year.

With regard to culture, the

promotion of cultural identity in

Unesco's activities over the next two

years will be accompanied by research

on the points of convergence of

civilizations. An important innovation is

a programme of intercultural studies

where there has been a particularly rich

mingling of cultures such as the

Caribbean and Indian Ocean areas.

Preparation of the General History

of Africa will be continued and a study

will be made of the possible use of some

African languages as instruments for the

transmission of knowledge in modern

education.

In the context of international

campaigns for the preservation of the

cultural heritage, the Conference

decided to add several new groups of

monuments to those benefiting from

this type of co-operation. They include

the architectural complex of San

Francisco de Lima, in Peru; the Sans¬

souci Palace and La Ferrière citadel in

Haiti; the historical monuments and

sites of Malta; the heritage of the Jesuit

missions to the Guarani Indians in

South America; the Island of Gorée in

Senegal; the monuments of Hué in

Vietnam; the main monuments and sites

of the cultural triangle in Sri Lanka;

and the sites of Chinguitti, Tichitt and

Oualata in Mauritania. Following the

appeal launched by the Director-General

last year, an intergovernmental

committee will be set up to promote the

return of cultural property to its country

of origin.

New investigations will be made into

the place of the arts and the status of

the artist in contemporary societies.

Unesco will also continue its work to

aid the planning of cultural

development. A regional conference on

cultural policies in the Arab States is

foreseen toward the end of this year.

The relationship between culture and

communication and more precisely the

immense possibilities which the mass

media offer for the democratization of

cultural life also figure among the

themes for study in the programme. But

without doubt the major change in the

field of communication is the stress laid

upon aid to Third World countries. It is

not a question simply of using the help

of industrialized countries to give the

poorer countries the infrastructures,

trained staff and equipment which they

lack. They must also be placed in a

position where their voices can be better

heard through an increase in the sources

of information. The General Conference

thus declared its support for a new

balance in the international circulation

of ideas. In this connection, the

International Commission for the Study

of Communication Problems (the

MacBride Commission), which was

established in 1977, is scheduled to

complete its work and publish its report

this year. A preliminary report was

discussed by the General Conference. In

addition, two regional conferences on

communication policies are slated, one

for Asia and Oceania in February 1979,

and the other for Africa ii 1980.

At the invitation of the government

of Yugoslavia, the next session of the

General Conference will be held in

Belgrade in 1980.

El-Wakil is New Chairman

of Unesco Executive Board

Dr. Chams Eldine El-Wakil of Egypt

was elected chairman of the Executive

Board of Unesco when the Board

opened its 106th session 29 November in

Paris. Formerly dean of the law faculty

of Alexandria University, Dr. El-Wakil

has also served as president of Beirut

Arab University and minister of higher

education in Egypt. As chairman of the

Executive Board he succeeds Mr.

Leonard C.J. Martin (United Kingdom)

whose term of office expired in

November.

II

Race and Mass Media:

Two Important Unesco Declarations

Among the outstanding

accomplishments of the Unesco General

Conference which ended on 28

. November 1978 was the adoption by

acclamation of two important

declarations concerning controversial

fields. The first was the Declaration on

Race and Racial Prejudice, the second

the Declaration of Fundamental

Principles Concerning the Contribution

of the Mass Media to Strengthening

Peace and International Understanding,

the Promotion of Human Rights, and to

Countering Racialism, Apartheid and

Incitement to War.

The race declaration proclaims that

"All human beings belong to a single

species and are descended from a

common stock. They are born equal in

dignity and rights and all form an

integral part of humanity."

"Racial prejudice," it adds, "...is

totally without justification," and "Any

theory which involves the claim that

racial or ethnic groups are inherently

superior or inferior... or which bases

value judgements on racial

differentiation, has no scientific

foundation and is contrary to the moral

and ethical principles of humanity."

The second declaration stresses the

contribution which the mass media can

make to "strengthening of peace and

international understanding, the

promotion of human rights and the

Photo Unesco/Dominique Roger

An historic moment for Unesco : delegates to

the General Conference give a standing

ovation to the Director-General following

adoption by acclamation of the Declaration

on the Mass Media.

countering of racialism, apartheid and

incitement to war." It also insists on the

need for a "free flow and a wider and

better balanced dissemination of

information" and recognizes that "the

exercise of freedom of opinion,

expression and information... is a vital

factor in the strengthening of peace and

international understanding."

In its preamble, the declaration

acknowledges "the aspirations of the

developing countries for the

establishment of a new, more just and

more effective world information and

communication order." It also calls for

the mass media of the developing

countries to be provided with

"conditions and resources enabling

them to gain strength and expand," and

an article lays stress on the protection of

journalists in the exercise of their

profession.

Lack of space precludes longer

citations from these important

documents, but readers of "News from

Unesco" may obtain the full text of

either of these declarations by writing

to: OPI/DPI,

Unesco, 7 Place de Fontenoy,

75700 Paris, France.

1977 Kalinga Award

goes to

Canadian Scientist

Canadian scientist and broadcaster

Fernand Seguin received the 1977

Kalinga Prize and the Unesco silver

medal for his life's work in the

popularization of science through his

numerous radio and television

programmes. Presenting the awards at a

special ceremony in Paris, Unesco

Director-General Amadou-Mahtar

M'Bow said that Mr. Seguin was the

first Kalinga prize-winner to have

demonstrated that television is the most

effective instrument of our time to

popularize science.

During the same ceremony, Mr.

M'Bow presented the 1978 Unesco

Science Prize to a team of researchers at

the United Kingdom's Rothamsted

Experimental Agricultural Station for

their work in developing a newpesticide.

Mr. Seguin, the Director-General

said, was a true scientist, a lecturer and

researcher in biology and pharmacology,

who had begun broadcasting for Radio

Canada in 1954 and had since made

hundreds of television programmes on

scientific subjects. At a time of rapid

advance in knowledge, he added, the

popularization of science was essential

for the general public to understand and

play its role in the shaping of science

policies. Reaching vast audiences

through television called for uncommon

and varied gifts which Mr. Seguin

possessed to a rare degree.

In reply, Mr. Seguin said the award

honoured Radio Canada too, since

audio-visual information was only .

possible through collective effort. On

the world level, he said, scientific

communication was more than the

simple transmission of knowledge. It

was also the transmission of the desire

to learn a desire which everyone tried

to satisfy by means of his own culture.

This desire, he added, must also be

inspired by the ideals of human

brotherhood.

Dr. Leslie Fowdon, director of the

Rothamsted Station, accepted the

Unesco Science Prize and silver medal

on behalf of the team which had

developed new pyrethroid insecticides

which are effective against a wide range

of insects. The chemicals, however, are

harmless to mammals and, being more

resistant to breakdown in sunlight, have

great potential for use in tropical

countries.

Ill

On Stage at Unesco A diversity of cultures was presented at

Unesco headquarters during the General

Conference through a series of events

and exhibitions.

The Conference opened with a

performance by the Svetoslav Obretenov

Bulgarian National Choir of Schiller's

Ode to Joy from Beethoven's 9th

Symphony; it closed with a rendering of

works by Mendelssohn sung by a

children's choir forming part of the

chorale of Radio France.

For five weeks, enthusiastic

audiences of delegates from Unesco's

146 Member States attended evening

performances given by some 350

instrumentalists, singers, dancers and

actors from 16 countries.

The events varied widely in tone and

content, ranging from the solemn

ceremony marking the 30th anniversary

of the Universal Declaration of Human

Rights to performances on traditional or

historical themes. In this latter category

came the African evening presented by

Dakar's Daniel Soràno Theatre

Company; a show based on Japanese

mythology and performed by the Yoshi

Oida Company; a ballet on the theme of

the liberation of Algeria danced by the

Lehib troupe; The King of the

Monkeys, a Chinese cartoon film

inspired by an ancient novel; and songs

and dances by Navajo Indians of the

U.S.A. Performances which brought

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Young visitors at the exhibition of "Toys

and Games of the World", organized with

the collaboration of the Bernard van Leer '

Foundation (The Netherlands).

together several artists or groups

included an evening of songs and

dancing by 26 pearl fishers from

Bahrein, which also featured the famous

violinist Yehudi Menuhin, the Ghosh

family trio from India and the Brazilian

guitarist Turibio Santos. Performances

of classical music included a recital by

another celebrated violinist, Henryk

. Szeryng, and concerts given by the

Zagreb soloists and Czechoslovakia's

Camerata Nova Ensemble. More

modern in spirit were a recital by

Susana Rinaldi, who brought to life

"the soul of the tango", evenings

featuring the Quebecan humorist Marc

Favreau and the Argentine composer-

performer Atahualpa Yupanqui, an

American show tracing half a century of

jazz history and two films dealing with

youth problems in the U.S.A.

Several delegations also organized

exhibitions, whose themes included : the

castles and palaces of the German

Democratic Republic; the cultural

heritage of Nepal; "Prague 1378-1978";

culture, science and education in the

U.S.S.R.; and the publications of

ALECSO, the Arab Educational,

Cultural and Scientific Organization. On

the eve of the International Year of the

Child, an exhibition of 900 games and

toys from 56 countries, many of them

made by children themselves, displayed

the creativity, inventiveness and artistic

talents of the young, as did exhibitions

of paintings and drawings by African

and Arab children and mosaics

produced by children from Bulgaria.

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